Pratfalls

The piece Geoff Dyer filed from hospital. (Via Leo Carey.)

The observation of our observing

Alberto Manguel in the NYT on the aftermath of his stroke last year and what it showed him about language and thought:

If thought, as I believe, forms itself in the mind by means of words, then, in the first fraction of a second, when the thought is sparked, the words that instantaneously cluster around it, like barnacles, are not clearly distinguishable to the mind’s eye: They constitute the thought only in potential, a shape underwater, present but not fully detailed. When a thought emerges in the language of the speaker (and each language produces particular thoughts that can be only imperfectly translated), the mind selects the most adequate words in that specific language, to allow the thought to become intelligible, as if the words were metal shavings gathering around the magnet of thought.

I am eternally grateful to Manguel because although I do not think it is the perfect book about reading, The History of Reading is sufficiently like the book I myself would write on the topic that it has saved me the trouble of doing so myself! (Have been having various exciting thoughts on what books I might want to write next, only I know that sharing them often lessens the impulse to write them, so will keep it all to myself until things are a bit further advanced.)

Another good brain bit in the NYT, in case you didn't see it: Ron Suskin on how Disney provided a language for his autistic son.

Prepped for action

What it feels like to have your salience network stimulated.

Insane in the membrane

A squid listens to Cypress Hill.

Either/or

The book Joyce Carol Oates wishes someone else would write (other good stuff in this interview too):

A work of such brilliant prose, such imaginative powers, such sweep, such flair, with such an irresistible story and riveting characters that simply by reading it attentively one could understand those discoveries of molecular biology, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, “philosophy of mind” and “string theory” in the way that their discoverers/creators understand them.

"I once met an aristocratic woman who had trepanned herself"

Christopher Turner on a new exhibit at the Wellcome. 

"The final thing"

A fascinating and moving piece by Tom Lubbock on losing language to a brain tumor.

"If I had a hammer" redux

Aida Edemariam interviews Terry Pratchett for the Guardian. Here, on the encroachments of Alzheimer's:

He doesn't say it in so many words, but that must also be combined with grief for the loss of his ability to write longhand, or type with anything other than one finger at a time (although, weirdly, he is still perfectly able to sign his name — "the bit that knows how to sign my name is an entirely different bit of the brain"); the grief of knowing that while he may have years yet, most of his other mental faculties will go the same way. But probably not suddenly.

"Every day must be a tiny, incrementally . . . incremental . . . incremental . . . – he stumbled over a word; you must write that one down," Pratchett says with a dark, almost-laugh. (Having been a journalist himself, before becoming a PR in the nuclear industry and thence a novelist, he rarely passes up a chance to remind you that he knows how journalists work) ". . . incremental . . . change on the day before. So what is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

"The last test I did was the first where I wasn't as good as the previous time. I actually forgot David Cameron. I just blanked on him" – this time the laugh contains, what – a kind of ironic approval? "What happens is, I call it the ball bearing. It's there, it just hasn't gone into the slot." He cannot begin to do tests that require him to scribble shapes, but asked to list names of animals, "I industriously say more than you can possibly imagine" – you can just see the pleasure of the earnest nerd in school – "and we go on for a little while until she smiles and says, 'Yes, we know, we know.'

"And then there was the time with dear Claudia with the Germanic accent – which is always good if someone's interrogating you – and she said, 'What would you do with a hammer? And I said, 'If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land.' And by the end I was dancing around the room, with her laughing. The laugh will be on the other foot, eventually, and I'm aware of that. But it shows how different things can be: I can still handle the language well, I can play tricks with it and all the other stuff – but I have to think twice when I put my pants on in the morning."

Recognition blues

You'll need a New Yorker subscription for access to the digital edition, but there is a fascinating piece this week by Oliver Sacks on his own lifelong inability to recognize faces and places.

Steamrollered

Tired, sad.

Closing a few tabs:

An amazing story from Oliver Sacks' forthcoming book, about a novelist whose stroke cost him the ability to read but who learned to circumvent the visual cortex and 'read' letters by shaping them with his tongue. (Link courtesy of the tireless Dave Lull; I can't wait to read The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks is more truly my writerly hero than anyone else I can think of.)

Three things I liked at the Independent this weekend: the Anthony Burgess archive opens in Manchester (here was my post a few years ago on Biswell's wonderful biography); the beauty of the periodic table of the elements; an interview with Terry Pratchett.

I have nothing much to say about War and Peace except that it is an outrageously good book; I was mesmerized by it when I read it for the first time at age 17, and was absolutely captivated by it again as soon as I opened the first page last week. Not enjoying Anna Karenina so much: it might be that it is not so much my sort of novel. (Just as one is an Iliad or an Odyssey sort of person, one also has a strong preference for the one or the other of Tolstoy's big novels? I am strongly Iliad, strongly War and Peace...)

Will save more detailed thoughts on Tolstoy's narration for the novel book, whose thunder I will steal if I blog all of it here in advance. But I did like Matthew Engel's dispatch from Waterloo in the FT this weekend (site registration required).

The electric trephine

Last night I read the first hundred pages or so of The Swarm (one of the last couple left of the January Humane Society haul), but Dorothy Dunnett has spoiled me: it is not at all bad, I guess, but the proportion of 'fact' to fiction was not what I found myself in the mood for ("You see, depending on the isotope -- you do know what an isotope is, don't you?" "Any two or more atoms of a chemical element with the same atomic number but with differing atomic mass." "Ten out of ten! So, take carbon" - real actual dialogue!).

So I put it aside and delved through the miscellany and came up with a book I've been meaning to read ever since I first read Oliver Sacks's piece about it in the NYRB (open-access PDF), Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull. It is an extraordinary little memoir about Karinthy's experience undergoing surgery to remove a tumor from his brain. This is a bit I especially liked (it gives the feel of the book's texture):

Incidentally, I have often noticed that my gestures are not original. I hold a cigarette exactly as my father did, and I have a way of turning my head that reminds me of a certain ex-Prime Minister of Hungary who once looked round in Parliament with an expression of surprise when some of us shouted a protest from the journalists' gallery. It is only when I am alone that I become conscious of these unnatural gestures, and once recognized I find them embarrassing. It amuses me to recall my first flight in an old-fashioned, pre-war aeroplane. I was alone with the pilot, who sat in front of me. Not a soul could see what I was doing, yet I found myself sitting in a rigidly conventional attitude. Carefully placing my hand in front of my mouth, I gave an embarrassed little cough. Then I tried to find the correct position for my hands. First I laid them carelessly on the sides of the 'plane, but I soon let them fall on to my lap and began strumming absent-mindedly with my fingers, as I had seen a fashionable actor do on the stage.

Brain food

"Nutritious brains"!

Squeak!

Went with my Clarissa students to see Quartett at BAM this evening. Some lovely moments: Isabel Huppert is a sight to behold, and I am fascinated by this notion of transforming Laclos's portrait of eighteenth-century libertinism for the modern stage (but can it really be that Heiner Müller never finished reading the whole of Dangerous Liaisons, as the program suggests? It is not a long novel!). But I found the music utterly awful. Embarrassingly awful! That spells ruination for the production as a whole, since it so much depends on the successful evocation of a sensibility.

(The only other Robert Wilson production I have seen, also at BAM, was much more effective - it was the 2002 Woyzeck - what was happening on stage was quite similar, and Isabel H. is the superior actor, quite mesmerizing at moments - but the Tom Waits music, performed live by a real orchestra, was so lovely in that case that it really brought the whole thing to life for me in a way that worked. The techno moments in this current production really made me squirm, but more generally even the snippets of classical stuff seem banal and thinly imagined - live music, for me, would have made a huge difference, as what was happening on stage was highly watchable, and the language and concept are engaging.)

I have hardly read any books recently! Or, rephrased, I am reading a lot for work stuff and between that and the Worm Triathlon's brain-tunneling effects plus marathon training obsessions, there has not been a lot of Light Reading going on round here. Sebastian Faulks's A Week in December was slight, a disappointment to me as I really loved his last one; William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms was better (and tapped into standard academic's fantasy of walking away from current life for something completely different and under the radar), but not his best. My Columbia colleage Mark Taylor's Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Living and Dying is an unusual and interesting book that really caught my attention, despite the fact that I am not its ideal audience (too pragmatic, more on the ethical and less on the metaphysical/existential end of intellectual pondering).

There is a passage on idleness that particularly resonated, and that I will share here (I was going to say "that I will share when I am less fatigued," but in fact it is precisely the things that make the passage speak to me that mean I am now unable not to transcribe it given that I have mentioned it!):

Nothing is harder for me to do than nothing. The issue is not merely psychological -- it is metaphysical, ethical, even religious. I guess my problem with doing nothing shows how deeply Protestant I remain. I have never been able to forget my grandmother's severe warning to me when I was a child: "Idleness is the devil's workshop." For her the idle person was not merely lazy but shiftless, useless, worthless. As the work of the devil, idleness, I was taught, is sin and sin, of course, breeds guilt. Even today I never feel more guilty than when I am doing nothing. I doubt I will ever completely overcome this sense of guilt and, indeed, sometimes I'm not even sure I want to do so.

What makes idleness so dangerous and thus so tempting is its purposelessness. Idleness, like play, has no end other than itself. If you can explain why you are idle, you are not idling. Redemption from this sin, my grandmother drilled into me, comes from work. That is why she always kept me busy--sometimes working, sometimes playing, or what she thought was playing. The problem was that my grandmother never really understood how to play. Forever suspicious of idleness, she had the remarkable ability to transform play into work, and she somehow managed to pass on this talent to her daughter, who in turn passed it on to me.

"Acoustic Kitty"

From Dominic Streatfeild, Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control:

The Office of Research and Development seems to have been especially interested in the idea of implanting microchips into the mammalian brain. By November 1961, 'feasibility of remote control activities in several species of animals' had been demonstrated. Six years later the Agency actually produced a cat ('Acoustic Kitty') that could be guided via remote control. The idea was that the cat, which contained hidden microphones, could be steered close to surveillance targets. Results were not good. A memo detailing plans for the first test, to take place on Monday, 20 February 1967, explains that the cat's operators should beware of traffic and that the team should 'secure gear and remove animals before rush hour'. They didn't. On its first field test the cat was run over by a taxi.

Brains!

At Publishers Weekly, Gwenda Bond has a fascinating piece on trends in paranormal romance and urban fantasy.

A labour of love

British psychiatrist knits anatomically correct replica of the human brain.

Ley-lines

Adam Nicholson on Roger Deakin's posthumous Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. Best quotation: "The thing that falls out of a walnut shell is like a brain."